Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!ukc!kl-cs!jonathan From: jonathan@cs.keele.ac.uk (Jonathan Knight) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: sigh (was Re: Short-circuiting a route) Message-ID: <667@kl-cs.UUCP> Date: 13 Jul 89 13:22:27 GMT References: Organization: University of Keele, England Lines: 31 From article , by lear@NET.BIO.NET (Eliot Lear): > Since the average length of a path after optimization is a smidgen > over two, the chances of it getting rerouted to a down host down the > path are small, (albeit the possibility exists). Most mail leaving this site does one hop to the destination. (about 90%). Of the remaining stuff that leaves, the path is rarely more that 3. (Not one case of > 3 sites in the path has left here in the last week) > The chances of a > user knowing that a particular system is down is even smaller (albeit > the possibility exists). I'd say that no users here would know about down sites. They don't need to as they are encouraged not to put routing in their mail addresses. That way the mailer sorts out the relevent relay (if one is needed) and passes it on. If the site is down then temporary fixes can be placed in the mailer tables. The users do not need to know about any problems at all. I'm not saying that the mail takes a max of three hops to get to its destination. I just pass the mail on to the next forwarder for the address at the front of the route. That way I don't need to worry about he complexities on other networks, I just need to make sure my mailer knows about the domains in which it is placed and also where all the forwarders for other domains are located. -- ______ JANET :jonathan@uk.ac.keele.cs Jonathan Knight, / BITNET:jonathan%cs.kl.ac.uk@ukacrl Department of Computer Science / _ __ other :jonathan@cs.keele.ac.uk University of Keele, Keele, (_/ (_) / / UUCP :...!ukc!kl-cs!jonathan Staffordshire. ST5 5BG. U.K.